Bottom Quote by Garrison Keillor

Any one who wishes to become a good writer should endeavour, before he allows himself to be tempted by the more showy qualities, to…

— Henry Watson Fowler

“A writer's style should be direct and personal, his imagery rich and earthy, and his words simple and vigorous. The greatest writers have the…

— Ernest Hemingway

“Good writers are avid readers. They have absorbed a vast inventory of words, idioms, constructions, tropes, and rhetorical tricks,”

— Steven Pinker

“There seems a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labor of the novelist, and of slighting performances which have only genius,…

— Jane Austen

Most good writing is clear, vigorous, honest, alive, sensuous, appropriate, unsentimental, rhythmic, without pretension, fresh, metaphorical, evocative in sound, economical, authoritative, surprising, memorable, and…

— Ken Macrorie

One is always enthralled, I think, when a young writer you're just beginning to read and comprehend dies.

— Joy Williams

At the beginning of their careers many writers have a need to overwrite. They choose carefully turned-out phrases; they want to impress their readers…

— Jorge Luis Borges

The most striking fault in work by young or beginning novelists, submitted for criticism, is irrelevance--due either to infatuation or indecision. To direct such…

— Elizabeth Bowen

“…the primary trait of young adult literature is that the author’s emphasis is on plot and character and not on his own brilliance. And…

— Eliot Schrefer

“Quite often, too, a writer who has for a time been believed to possess a great store of ordinarily profound ideas, and who is…

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have mighty dull literature if all the writers…

— William Styron

“We are writing in the age of stylish minimalism that in truth has become even more cautious because of word processing. Nowadays, creative writing…

— Stephen Kuusisto